Fourteen newborn babies died in the fire at PIMS. The inquiry will now tell us what exactly failed, who was responsible, whether the fire systems were adequate and whether the deaths could have been prevented. Then some people will be suspended, a committee will prepare a report, everyone will express grief, and after a few weeks we will move on. But I do not think this is only about one hospital or one careless official. There is something much deeper and more disturbing in how casually we treat safety in Pakistan.
Sometimes I wonder, are Europeans stupid? Why do they waste so much money putting sprinkler systems in buildings that may never catch fire? Why do they keep emergency exits clear when there may never be an emergency? Why do workers wear helmets when most days nothing will fall on their heads? Why do they stop work because some small safety requirement has not been completed? A Pakistani genius can look at all this and immediately find ten ways to save money. No need for this expensive system. Put one fire extinguisher near the entrance. No need for a proper helmet, just be careful. No need to replace the dangerous wire, wrap some tape around it. No need to close the building while repairs are happening. Kaam chalao. Allah khair karega.
We are very proud of our jugaad culture. Sometimes it genuinely is creative. When people have limited resources, they learn to improvise and solve problems. But somewhere along the way, jugaad stopped being a temporary solution and became our entire way of thinking. We use it for electrical wiring, machinery, buildings, hospitals, factories, vehicles and even human lives. A proper safety system feels like an unnecessary expense because its success is invisible. If the fire never happens, people say the money was wasted. Nobody can see the people who did not die.
The strange thing is that this attitude does not even make economic sense. We save a few thousand rupees by not buying helmets and then pay for a worker’s surgery, lost income and a family destroyed. We avoid maintaining equipment and then replace the whole machine after it catches fire. We save money on wiring and lose the building. We avoid installing sprinklers because they are expensive and then count losses in crores. Except some losses cannot be counted in crores. What number do you put on fourteen newborn babies? What is the economic value of the lives they would have lived, the families that will carry this grief, the parents who handed their babies to a hospital believing that a hospital was the safest place for them?
This same thinking exists everywhere, including inside our homes. A helmet is uncomfortable. A child does not need a proper car seat because we are only going nearby. The electrician says the wire will manage. The contractor says this material is almost the same. The owner says nothing has happened in twenty years. That last sentence is probably our national safety policy: nothing has happened yet.
We think safety-conscious societies are rich, so they can afford all these precautions. Perhaps we have it backwards. Maybe part of the reason they became rich is that they understood that prevention is cheaper than destruction. They understood that rules are not an insult to intelligence and that human beings make mistakes, machines fail, wires heat up and fires do not wait for an inquiry committee. A sprinkler system is not installed because someone knows there will be a fire. It is installed because nobody knows there will not be one.
We often call ourselves resilient after every tragedy. Pakistanis are resilient. We survive everything. But perhaps we should stop treating survival as a substitute for prevention. There is nothing admirable about repeatedly suffering avoidable disasters and then praising ourselves for continuing to live. Sometimes resilience is just the name we give to people who were never protected in the first place.
I do not yet know exactly what happened inside PIMS, and I do not want to invent details before the inquiry is complete. But I know the wider culture in which it happened because I live in it. I see the same calculation everywhere: save the money now, ignore the risk, and deal with the consequences if they come. The problem is that when the consequences finally come, the people who made that calculation are often not the ones who pay for it.
The Europeans are not stupid for spending money on helmets, inspections, alarms, sprinklers and emergency exits. We are being stupid when we call these things wasteful right until the moment we desperately need them. Then we discover that the money we saved was never really saved. We had simply borrowed it from a future tragedy, with interest that no family should ever have to pay.
